Laurel Loflund - 07 October 2008 08:22 PM
Hello, Josiah,
Welcome to Kinism.net. Nice to see you posting here.
Re: Asperger’s Syndrome. I’ve had the privilege/challenge of teaching numbers of Asperger’s kids over the years. There is a range of manifestation in the syndrome, and while I’ve found many to lack social skills, I’ve also found incredible founts of creativity in these students. Not the bleak linear math abilities that you relate at all. Maybe one student of the numbers that I have taught fit your description.
When Asperger’s runs over into what I call “borderline Autism,” there is often a spatial awareness that is quite remarkable. Outside of the school environment, I’ve had contact with a young man who was quite Autistic as a child and became a highly functioning in the teenage years and ended up being a successful architect because he had this phenomenal ability to walk through in his mind the environments he designed on paper. He could actually see and experience what worked and what didn’t.
Sure, there are linear mathematical people out there. But my personal experience tells me they are probably not all Asperger’s.
God bless,
Laurel
Thanks. Asperger’s Syndrome is a form of Autism, or in the current terminology an “Autism spectrum disorder.” One reason for calling it a “spectrum” is that Aspergers is a tendency, an identifiable set of traits with a direction to them, or as you say “a range.” Yet the disorder can be diagnosed by a doctor and described by a teacher.
Further, do not confuse spatial thinking with visual thinking. Aspergers are visual thinkers, but not spatial, and there is an important difference between the two. Furthermore, since the Asperger’s sufferer thinks in digital bursts of information, from his standpoint he is not linear at all; the bursts are disconnected. The disconnection is why Aspergers can be so incomprehensible to others. However, something in the burst will lead to another burst which leads to another burst. What that something is, the sufferer of Asperger’s might not be able to tell you and if he did it likely might make no sense.
This is why I used (above) the phrase “stand back.” Spatial thinking, as opposed to visual, allows for a global view, it allows the making of multiple interconnections through space. Athletes are excellent spatial thinkers, Aspergers are typically awful athletes. Spatial thinkers are visual thinkers, but not all visual thinkers are spatial. Here is an analogy: if you navigate when you drive by carrying a map in your head that resembles a bird’s eye view of where you are going, correctly oriented to the north, you are a spatial thinker. If someone asks where you live, at say, the grocery store, and you point with your arm to where you live four miles away, you are a spatial thinker. However, if you give directions by landmarks—“turn left at the white church, then right at the big red barn”—you are a visual thinker. You see, this visual approach is a series of places to turn. Series of discrete data is the general tendency that Asperger’s sufferers take in thinking.
